This course will look at the ways in which various kinds of censorship have affected writing and reading. The course will look at the history of censorship in general and several case studies in particular.
Topics:
• Censorship in ancient Greece and Rome
• Christianity and censorship; the Inquisition: the cases of Giordano Bruno and Galileo
• Vatican and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
• Censorship and the Elizabethan stage
• Licensing Acts and Milton's Areopagitica
• Censorship in the 18th Century: Stage Licensing Acts; Curll’s Venus in Cloister; Stamp Acts; Thomas Bowdler; Obscenity acts
• Revolutionary France: the case of Marquis de Sade
• Censorship in India and the British Raj
• Censorship in the Communist bloc
• Salman Rushdie and the politics of fatwa
• Censorship now: the religious and the political right
Possible case studies
• Mark Twain, Huck Finn
• Dinabandhu Mitra, Nil darpan
• Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
• James Joyce, Ulysses
Abhijit Gupta
